I'm curious as to what Toolkit would be good for a commercial game engine. I'll be doing game programming a few years from now after college, and I want to use the toolkit that is best to use right from the start. Preferabley something fast, not too complicated, and the most important is portability for different platforms. Thanks.

-Jase

dorbie

01-04-2004, 08:47 PM

You have lots of choices.

You could go with a real game, like the quake source code, but it's a bit dated.
http://mfcn.ilo.de/glxquake/ http://www.quakeforge.net/

You could try modding, maybe one of the unreal engines.
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/4120

You could go with Open Scene Graph
http://openscenegraph.sourceforge.net/

You could try Crystal Space.
http://crystal.sourceforge.net/

[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 01-04-2004).]

marcus256

01-06-2004, 10:47 AM

You have to decide if you want:

1) A fullblown game engine
2) A scene graph
3) A simple toolkit

Dorbie mentioned game engines and scene graphs. Toolkits are lower level, and basically provides an abstraction layer on top of operating system mechanisms and resources (windowing, timers, user input etc), while a scene graph also abstracts OpenGL (or whatever graphics API), and a game engine has it all (graphics, physics, AI, sound, etc).

Decide which way to go. The trend these days seem to be for commercial game developers to use more and more 3rd party solutions for most parts of the game engine, so that the game developer can concentrate on content.

If, however, you want to do it "the hard way", you can design your own game engine from scratch, but at the very least you should use a portable toolkit, since that saves you alot of time and trouble related to things that do not really concern the game engine itself.

A few popular toolkits: GLUT (not very good for games, especially not a few years from now), GLFW (better for games, more modern), cpw (not yet very portable), FLTK (doesn't seem very game oriented), SDL (certainly game oriented, and portable).

Jase

01-07-2004, 12:59 PM

Actually, I originally ment what opengl toolkit would be best to use.. :P I have messed with some other game engines before... and they seem an option, but i figured I would try and develope a game engine from scratch myself... I just want an opengl toolkit that is portable and is good for game performance.

Thanks.

ZbuffeR

01-07-2004, 06:39 PM

Originally posted by Jase:
but i figured I would try and develope a game engine from scratch myself... I just want an opengl toolkit that is portable and is good for game performance.
For that, GLFW is quite good. Simple, fast and portable.